This chapter looks at the anthropological contributions to resistance as it manifests itself within people’s everyday lives. It sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which power, in the Foucauldian sense, is renegotiated in the context of everyday relationships and cultural activities. The material discussed in this chapter offers a reflection on how new forms of identities around gender and sexuality, religion, race, and ultimately agency are produced through political and cultural forms of resistance to sexism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, imperialism, and nationalism. In the first part, the chapter sets out the anthropological debates on resistance with a specific focus on Black feminist anthropology and anthropology of law and human rights. In a second part, the chapter examines different samples of feminist practice of resistance including political protest and social movements and everyday bodily performativity. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the methodological implications a feminist-queer anthropological gaze on resistance entails, stressing the need to take the voices and experiences of actors located at the margins as a starting point from where to understand the diverse, and to some extent paradoxical, forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power.

H. Patrick Glenn’s works are the result of a profound reflection on the epistemological conditions of comparative law in our epoch. He recognized that, since the emergence of the modern state, legal theory focused nearly exclusively on the state as a source of law. His approach to the study of comparative law expressed the conviction that a historical shift in emphasis in the conceptualization of Western law was long overdue. Accordingly, he considered how states and state law exist in a larger context, where alternative forms of normativity are working. This reflection brought about the open recognition of a wider range of sources of law and a wider range of relations between laws and between peoples, which explains why much of his work is to be inscribed in the paradigm of legal pluralism. His work goes beyond that paradigm, however, by exploring what pluralism entails both at the national and at the transnational level for comparative law studies, and for their methodological orientation. This chapter pays tribute to his vision and his scholarship by exploring how comparative law can fruitfully engage with legal anthropology, legal linguistics, and translation studies, as well as with the dynamics of transnational and global law.

This chapter addresses core theoretical issues surrounding global/transnational legal pluralism, taking up the work of leading theorists. First, is demonstrates that global legal pluralism is very different from earlier versions of legal pluralism (postcolonial and sociological). Next, is exposes the flaw of overinclusive conceptions of legal pluralism, which appears in the global legal pluralism of Paul Berman, and it explains why theoretical concepts of law cannot solve this flaw. It then addresses the profusion of private and hybrid regulatory forms on the domestic and transnational levels, and marks the line between theory and practice. Thereafter, it exposes problems with the relational concept of law formulated for global legal pluralism by Ralf Michaels, showing why it is unsuitable for many situations of legal pluralism. The approach to transnational legal pluralism the chapter articulates avoids these conceptual problems. It centres on conventionally identified forms of law that vary and change over time, which can be grouped in terms of three categories: community law, regime law and cross-polity law. Finally, it sets forth a handful of specific lessons for a reconstructed transnational legal pluralism.